Organising Evernote for Students

[Yu Zhengwen 0]

This is my first post, hope I've posted in the correct section.

 

So I've recently gotten into Evernote and its power

 

I am a student. I would like to use Evernote to organise both school and personal stuff.

For school, I have subjects like biology, physics, math, etc. Then I do some personal projects like programming and playing with my Raspberry PI, stuff like that.

I want to use Evernote to organise them. I did it with a notebook for school and personal then using tags to organise, but I want to have a consistent layout in my task management app, which is Wunderlist, I use it extensively already and most of my tasks are on there. However it only allows me to organise tasks into folders which contains lists and I am unable to replicate my setup in evernote. 

 

I would like to be able to find individual projects. (I have many History projects and would like to go to them easily..)

 

I also need a method to archive projects or at least organise the notes by year

 

Can someone give me a suggestion? Thanks

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

Hi. Welcome to the forums. Here is one suggestion.

http://www.christopher-mayo.com/?p=1724

[Yu Zhengwen 0]

Hi. Welcome to the forums. Here is one suggestion.

http://www.christopher-mayo.com/?p=1724

THanks for quick reply. But your link lacked several things I need: a method of archiving entire projects, keeping their hirarchy, and I have multiple projects WITHIN a class. Many of them requiring research, etc.

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

Hi. Welcome to the forums. Here is one suggestion.

http://www.christopher-mayo.com/?p=1724

THanks for quick reply. But your link lacked several things I need: a method of archiving entire projects, keeping their hirarchy, and I have multiple projects WITHIN a class. Many of them requiring research, etc.

1. archiving:

"After the course has ended, I recommend you change student permissions to “view only,” and ask them to copy the notebook into their own accounts. Doing this will ensure that no members of the notebook inadvertently delete / modify anything in the future, and it will free you to archive the contents of the notebook somewhere in your own account. I have a screencast explaining how to copy notes out of a joined notebook."

2. hierarchy:

see step #2. the index note has an almost unlimited potential for sub-categories / hierarchies.

3. multiple projects:

again, see step #2. the index notes can deal with all of that.

4. anything lacking:

see the links at the bottom of the blog post.

[Candid 167]

This is my first post, hope I've posted in the correct section.

 

So I've recently gotten into Evernote and its power

 

I am a student. I would like to use Evernote to organise both school and personal stuff.

For school, I have subjects like biology, physics, math, etc. Then I do some personal projects like programming and playing with my Raspberry PI, stuff like that.

I want to use Evernote to organise them. I did it with a notebook for school and personal then using tags to organise, but I want to have a consistent layout in my task management app, which is Wunderlist, I use it extensively already and most of my tasks are on there. However it only allows me to organise tasks into folders which contains lists and I am unable to replicate my setup in evernote. 

 

 

 

My first suggestion is that you not try to have the same layout in Wunderlist and Evernote. Wunderlist is more focused on managing and getting things done while Evernote is an information storage system. 

 

So I would set up my reminders and due dates using Wunderlist and not worry about that functionality in Evernote. To try to get them both to look the same would mean spending at least twice as much time, not a good strategy.

 

 

I would like to be able to find individual projects. (I have many History projects and would like to go to them easily..)

 

I also need a method to archive projects or at least organise the notes by year

 

Can someone give me a suggestion? Thanks

 

I think based on this desire, I would suggest a notebook for each subject and then an overall School stack. In each course notebook you'll create tags for various things including projects. You may also have a generic "homework" or "reading assignment" tag. The nice thing about Evernote is these generic tags will work in each notebook and depending on where you search (in one notebook or in the stack) you can turn up either homework for one class or all classes. Projects will get their own tag so "History Research Project Civil War Salt Production." Don't worry about archiving these projects if they will come to an end at the end of the semester. They'll get archived then. In the meantime they'll continue to live in the course notebook. If you have your notebooks sorted by updated or created date, these notes will fall to the bottom of the notebook out of sight. 

 

I would also consider what makes most sense for some items. For instance, you might like to type in each reading assignment for the year as a separate action item. This is not something I would store in Evernote, I'd just put it in Wunderlist with a due date. I'd store the overall syllabus and reading assignments in Evernote for reference later. 

 

For archiving subjects, use Christopher's idea about archiving subjects when you finish them. What I would do is tag all notes in a class notebook with a tag indicating the course title and semester so "History 345 Fall 2015" would be a tag. I wouldn't add this until I completed the class. Then I would highlight all the notes in that notebook, add the course tag, and drag them to an archive notebook. 

 

What you will want to do is be consistent in how you name things in both systems. So if you have a project or class in Wunderlist, it should have the same name in Evernote. 

 

You can also use notelinks in Evernote to link information on due dates and projects in Wunderlist. Just paste the link in the notes section at Wunderlist. Inside Evernote you may wish to create table of content notes that list all the notes of research you've collected for a project. This would be a good note to link to the due dates you've set up in Wunderlist. 

[Analyst444 182]

Yu - Here are my suggestions.

 

Stacks - Establish a stack for each "role" you play in your life. Other than "student" and "personal", I could only guess what your other "roles" might be. Maybe you have a part-time job. Maybe there is some hobby that you have. Here is an example of what your list of stacks might look like:

• Student
• Personal
• Worker
• ChessPlayer

The advantage of designing your stacks around your "roles" is that it is common that information for one "role" typically isn't relevant to another "role" and, therefore, you won't be taking time to switch from stack to stack very often.

 

You should also establish at least 1 stack for information that is relevant to more than one of the "role" stacks. A "ReferenceInformation" stack is an example.

 

(Do not include any spaces in the words in your stack names. Don't worry about why right now. The day will come when you use some of the advanced features of Evernote and you will be glad you did.)

 

 

Notebooks - Let's start with the "Student" stack. Your task is to think of those "entities" that you deal with as a student. Here are some examples of what those Notebooks could be:

• Classes
• Subjects
• Teachers
• Schools

That is just one approach for a conceptual design for those Notebooks.

 

Another approach would be for each Notebook to be a project and to implement the "entities" as Tags. For example, the Tags for subjects could be:

• S=Math
• S=Physics
• S=Biology

(Don't worry right now why the syntax is "S=". Again, later on when you use other features of Evernote you will be glad you did.)

 

 

Examples of Notebooks for your "Personal" stack are:

• Programming
• Raspberry PI

 

 

Tags - If you don't go with the Tagging scheme I mentioned above, a common one used I think by a lot of people is the "Who, What, When, Where" scheme. Since those words start with "W", you can use a "P" for people Tags. Example are:

• P= NameOfPerson1 
• P= NameOfPerson2
• P= NameOfPerson3

You could use "L" for where Tags. Examples are:

• L= NameOfLocation1
• L= NameOfLocation2
• L= NameOfLocation3

I'm sure you see the patter now and get the concept.

 

For projects, you could also have Tags that define the project's status: Examples are:

• S=Planned
• S=Active
• S-Complete

 

 

Note Titles - The best thing I could say about Note Titles, particularly for your role as a student, is to establish a very specific and standard structure for them. Here is an example of a standard format:

xxxxxxxxxx - yyyymmdd - 

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

 

where xxxxxxxxxx is one to two words that categorize the Note, yyyymmdd is a date that is important to you (maybe a due date), and 

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz is 3-10 words that indicated what the Note is about.

[Yu Zhengwen 0]

 

This is my first post, hope I've posted in the correct section.

 

So I've recently gotten into Evernote and its power

 

I am a student. I would like to use Evernote to organise both school and personal stuff.

For school, I have subjects like biology, physics, math, etc. Then I do some personal projects like programming and playing with my Raspberry PI, stuff like that.

I want to use Evernote to organise them. I did it with a notebook for school and personal then using tags to organise, but I want to have a consistent layout in my task management app, which is Wunderlist, I use it extensively already and most of my tasks are on there. However it only allows me to organise tasks into folders which contains lists and I am unable to replicate my setup in evernote. 

 

 

 

My first suggestion is that you not try to have the same layout in Wunderlist and Evernote. Wunderlist is more focused on managing and getting things done while Evernote is an information storage system. 

 

So I would set up my reminders and due dates using Wunderlist and not worry about that functionality in Evernote. To try to get them both to look the same would mean spending at least twice as much time, not a good strategy.

 

 

I would like to be able to find individual projects. (I have many History projects and would like to go to them easily..)

 

I also need a method to archive projects or at least organise the notes by year

 

Can someone give me a suggestion? Thanks

 

I think based on this desire, I would suggest a notebook for each subject and then an overall School stack. In each course notebook you'll create tags for various things including projects. You may also have a generic "homework" or "reading assignment" tag. The nice thing about Evernote is these generic tags will work in each notebook and depending on where you search (in one notebook or in the stack) you can turn up either homework for one class or all classes. Projects will get their own tag so "History Research Project Civil War Salt Production." Don't worry about archiving these projects if they will come to an end at the end of the semester. They'll get archived then. In the meantime they'll continue to live in the course notebook. If you have your notebooks sorted by updated or created date, these notes will fall to the bottom of the notebook out of sight. 

 

I would also consider what makes most sense for some items. For instance, you might like to type in each reading assignment for the year as a separate action item. This is not something I would store in Evernote, I'd just put it in Wunderlist with a due date. I'd store the overall syllabus and reading assignments in Evernote for reference later. 

 

For archiving subjects, use Christopher's idea about archiving subjects when you finish them. What I would do is tag all notes in a class notebook with a tag indicating the course title and semester so "History 345 Fall 2015" would be a tag. I wouldn't add this until I completed the class. Then I would highlight all the notes in that notebook, add the course tag, and drag them to an archive notebook. 

 

What you will want to do is be consistent in how you name things in both systems. So if you have a project or class in Wunderlist, it should have the same name in Evernote. 

 

You can also use notelinks in Evernote to link information on due dates and projects in Wunderlist. Just paste the link in the notes section at Wunderlist. Inside Evernote you may wish to create table of content notes that list all the notes of research you've collected for a project. This would be a good note to link to the due dates you've set up in Wunderlist. 

 

Hey, that's a great implementation. But there are many projects for different subjects and you said have a tag for each project, but there will be many tags, unorganised..

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

there is no reason tags have to be disorganized.

http://www.christopher-mayo.com/?p=437

[Yu Zhengwen 0]

there is no reason tags have to be disorganized.

http://www.christopher-mayo.com/?p=437

Ive read his article but I it isn't very clear, and I don't think it suits me.

I prefer @Candid's method. But his method doesn't allow for organising projects and archiving stuff, he said "don't worry about them, archive it at end of sem." And I want to keep the archived stuff IN evernote 

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

there is no reason tags have to be disorganized.http://www.christopher-mayo.com/?p=437

Ive read his article but I it isn't very clear, and I don't think it suits me.

I prefer @Candid's method. But his method doesn't allow for organising projects and archiving stuff, he said "don't worry about them, archive it at end of sem." And I want to keep the archived stuff IN evernote

you can archive stuff in evernote. no reason you need to move it out. in fact, i'd recommend keeping it in there (as mentioned earlier -- "... it will free you to archive the contents of the notebook somewhere in your own account"). but, you only get 250 notebooks, so i'd tag it all, move it out of your notebooks, and dump it into an "archive" notebook. it'll stay organized with tags or a saved search.

not sure what is unclear about the article. could you explain what you mean? it's an explanation of why tags are unnecessary for some use cases, a collection of different methods for people who want to tag, and links to other tagging systems. if none of these quite fit, perhaps if you tell us what is not fitting, we could help.

[Analyst444 182]

Yu - You say you "want to keep the archived stuff IN Evernote". Fine. Create a stack or a Notebook named "Archived Stuff" and move Notes there when you decide it is time.

 

If you don't like Tags, then don't use them. Evernote's search function is very powerful. Use keywords in Note titles and the body of your Notes and the vast majority of times the search function will find what you are looking for.

 

My sense is that you don't yet have a vision of how you want to structure your information in Evernote, despite the variety of ideas that Candid, GrumpyMoney, and I offered you. - - - If that is the case, I'd suggest you need to provide details on what "organizing projects" means to you, before any of us can come closer to an information structure for you using Evernote.

[Yu Zhengwen 0]

Yu - You say you "want to keep the archived stuff IN Evernote". Fine. Create a stack or a Notebook named "Archived Stuff" and move Notes there when you decide it is time.

 

If you don't like Tags, then don't use them. Evernote's search function is very powerful. Use keywords in Note titles and the body of your Notes and the vast majority of times the search function will find what you are looking for.

 

My sense is that you don't yet have a vision of how you want to structure your information in Evernote, despite the variety of ideas that Candid, GrumpyMoney, and I offered you. - - - If that is the case, I'd suggest you need to provide details on what "organizing projects" means to you, before any of us can come closer to an information structure for you using Evernote.

 

 

 

 

there is no reason tags have to be disorganized.http://www.christopher-mayo.com/?p=437

Ive read his article but I it isn't very clear, and I don't think it suits me.

I prefer @Candid's method. But his method doesn't allow for organising projects and archiving stuff, he said "don't worry about them, archive it at end of sem." And I want to keep the archived stuff IN evernote

you can archive stuff in evernote. no reason you need to move it out. in fact, i'd recommend keeping it in there (as mentioned earlier -- "... it will free you to archive the contents of the notebook somewhere in your own account"). but, you only get 250 notebooks, so i'd tag it all, move it out of your notebooks, and dump it into an "archive" notebook. it'll stay organized with tags or a saved search.

not sure what is unclear about the article. could you explain what you mean? it's an explanation of why tags are unnecessary for some use cases, a collection of different methods for people who want to tag, and links to other tagging systems. if none of these quite fit, perhaps if you tell us what is not fitting, we could help.

 

I think ive found a way which suits me. I have a stack school, notebook for each subject. Then 2 tags - class notes and projects. old notes gets buried under (maybe I'll create an 'archive' tag also.' as good as archived. Then say I do a project: I just tag it projects and put it in the appropriate subject notebook, then I'll name it so its easily findable. Not very elegant but works greatly.

Then in wunderlist I have few lists under school, including Homework and CCA. BINGO!

Thanks for all the help. Much of this came from inspiration you all gave me!

[Candid 167]

 

 

This is my first post, hope I've posted in the correct section.

 

So I've recently gotten into Evernote and its power

 

I am a student. I would like to use Evernote to organise both school and personal stuff.

For school, I have subjects like biology, physics, math, etc. Then I do some personal projects like programming and playing with my Raspberry PI, stuff like that.

I want to use Evernote to organise them. I did it with a notebook for school and personal then using tags to organise, but I want to have a consistent layout in my task management app, which is Wunderlist, I use it extensively already and most of my tasks are on there. However it only allows me to organise tasks into folders which contains lists and I am unable to replicate my setup in evernote. 

 

 

 

My first suggestion is that you not try to have the same layout in Wunderlist and Evernote. Wunderlist is more focused on managing and getting things done while Evernote is an information storage system. 

 

So I would set up my reminders and due dates using Wunderlist and not worry about that functionality in Evernote. To try to get them both to look the same would mean spending at least twice as much time, not a good strategy.

 

 

I would like to be able to find individual projects. (I have many History projects and would like to go to them easily..)

 

I also need a method to archive projects or at least organise the notes by year

 

Can someone give me a suggestion? Thanks

 

I think based on this desire, I would suggest a notebook for each subject and then an overall School stack. In each course notebook you'll create tags for various things including projects. You may also have a generic "homework" or "reading assignment" tag. The nice thing about Evernote is these generic tags will work in each notebook and depending on where you search (in one notebook or in the stack) you can turn up either homework for one class or all classes. Projects will get their own tag so "History Research Project Civil War Salt Production." Don't worry about archiving these projects if they will come to an end at the end of the semester. They'll get archived then. In the meantime they'll continue to live in the course notebook. If you have your notebooks sorted by updated or created date, these notes will fall to the bottom of the notebook out of sight. 

 

I would also consider what makes most sense for some items. For instance, you might like to type in each reading assignment for the year as a separate action item. This is not something I would store in Evernote, I'd just put it in Wunderlist with a due date. I'd store the overall syllabus and reading assignments in Evernote for reference later. 

 

For archiving subjects, use Christopher's idea about archiving subjects when you finish them. What I would do is tag all notes in a class notebook with a tag indicating the course title and semester so "History 345 Fall 2015" would be a tag. I wouldn't add this until I completed the class. Then I would highlight all the notes in that notebook, add the course tag, and drag them to an archive notebook. 

 

What you will want to do is be consistent in how you name things in both systems. So if you have a project or class in Wunderlist, it should have the same name in Evernote. 

 

You can also use notelinks in Evernote to link information on due dates and projects in Wunderlist. Just paste the link in the notes section at Wunderlist. Inside Evernote you may wish to create table of content notes that list all the notes of research you've collected for a project. This would be a good note to link to the due dates you've set up in Wunderlist. 

 

Hey, that's a great implementation. But there are many projects for different subjects and you said have a tag for each project, but there will be many tags, unorganised..

 

 

Tags can be organized in Evernote if you like. In your case you can have a "School Tag." Drag all the subject tags to it and they will show up underneath it. Then drag the project tags to each subject tag and they will show up underneath that subject tag. 

 

BUT let me encourage you to let go of this idea of a hierarchy of tags being organized. This thinking will limit how you can use tags. Instead think about how you will use tags. I  think that will mostly be to find the associated notes in a search. In Evernote, you can start at all notes and do a tag search by typing "tag:civilwarsaltproject" this will bring up all the notes you have with that tag no matter where they are. No need to dig down through an elaborate hierarchy. Where this gets to interesting is that some tags will be used in different notebooks denoting differing aspects of the tag. In my case I taught and I have a tag for my state. In my school notebook this will bring up educational things about my state (history, state resources, literature, etc.) But over in my travel notebook it will bring up places I thought I might like to visit. I can search in each of those different places for differing takes OR I can do a global search. I can also combine the tag with other tags to get notes that have both those aspects (so state history or state fishing sites).